Standard Bank pay-day outage strikes

Standard Bank online and mobile banking channels are down, with numerous customers complaining they cannot log into the mobile banking app or Internet banking.
Complaints on Twitter showed that users of both the Android and iOS banking apps were greeted with a “The app is offline” notification.
“You may be finding it difficult to use our banking app. We are sorting this out,” the message states.
“Your card services, ATMs, Internet Banking and Cellphone Banking are not affected.”
The bank apologised and said customers would be informed of updates on the app.
According to the Standard Bank Downdetector page, however, the issues were also affecting Internet banking.
The page showed a significant increase in reports from just before 08:00 on Wednesday.
“I’ve been struggling to use both the app and website. Looks like we’re down again,” one user reported.
Most of the complaints were flagged with online banking and mobile banking.
The graph below shows the increase in reports of issues with Standard Bank’s channels on Downdetector on Wednesday morning.
About an hour after these complaints first increased, the bank’s own service status portal showed digital channels would be unavailable until 10:00 AM.
It also indicated that app and Internet logins were “under maintenance”.
This is the third time in 2021 that Standard Bank’s systems have suffered issues around the pay-day period.
The latest downtime comes after the bank’s self-service channels were inaccessible for several hours on Tuesday and Wednesday morning due to routine maintenance.
The bank informed its customers that digital services would not be available between 23:00 on Tuesday and 04:00 on Wednesday.
The app and Internet banking remained inaccessible long after this, however.
Update — 11:56
Standard Bank said its digital banking services are now available to customers.
“Standard Bank had informed customers that scheduled maintenance would be taking place between 10 pm and 4 am today,” the bank said.
“While our other banking channels were available, our digital channels took longer to update and recover causing them to be unavailable until 10am this morning.”
The mobile banking App and Internet Banking are now fully operational.
“We apologise for the delay in restoring our services to our customers and we appreciate their patience and understanding,” Standard Bank said.